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How to Align Change Strategy with Organizational Personality
- By Peter Adebi
- Published February 3, 2008
- Change Management
- Unrated
Peter Adebi
PETER ADEBI is a seasoned HR/Organizational Development consultant and leadership coach. He is founder of Star Leadership® and author of many human resource articles.
View all articles by Peter Adebi
Countless change agents and other organizational interventionists fail to achieve desired results because they ignore or are unaware of the need to closely align change strategy with organizational personality. Durk I. Jager, former CEO of Procter & Gamble Co., was clear about his goals when he took office in 1999: shore up overseas operation and grow top brands. These measures would remedy sagging sales and redeem P&G's image as the leading global marketer of consumer products. However, Jager's strategy for achieving these goals was perceived as being so abrasive, so discordant with P&G's personality, that his management team rebelled against him. He was forced to resign in less than two years. Alan G. Lafley, a longtime executive who understood and respected the company culture, took office in 2000. Through a combination of wisdom, humility, personal engagement, and a careful alignment of change strategy to corporate personality, Lafley has turned P&G into one of the great corporate success stories of the twenty-first century.
Lauded as the most innovative change agent for corporate culture, Carly Fiorina could not achieve her desired result at Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina had the right idea-turn HP into a more nimble market driver. By many accounts, she did just about everything right except for one thing: she underestimated the power of the HP Way. Even as criticism mounted about her imperial style, intolerance for dissent, finger pointing, swift and harsh measures, and alienation of rank-and-file employees, she proceeded seemingly contumeliously. Consequently, HP's bottom line worsened under her leadership. Ironically, Mark Hurd, a relatively obscure figure, who replaced Fiorina after she was sacked in 2005, managed to accomplish much of what Fiorina dreamed of-delayer the organization, replace some of the old guard, increase response time to the market, improve financial performance-without encountering the same level of resistance and backlash. Like Lafley, Hurd demonstrates that any degree of change can be achieved by working through existing culture even if the ultimate goal is to replace that culture.
The above high-profile examples illustrate what can happen when there is misalignment at the highest level of an organization. The focus here, however, is on how to address this issue at all levels of the organization, with emphasis on the role of human resource, organization development, and training leaders.
What is organizational personality?
Personality is composed of a person's innate tendencies, such as left-handedness or introversion, and external influence such as upbringing and experiences. Both influences, natural and learned, shape assumptions, beliefs, interests, and behavior.
Just as every person has a unique personality, the vision, mission, values, beliefs, assumptions, experiences, and attitude of every organization constitute its distinct personality.
Additional information on how organizations learn, act, grow, and ultimately die like living organisms is well documented in the works of such respected business scholars as Arie de Geus, Peter Senge, and William Bridges.
Why is knowing your organization's personality important?
Strategy and organizational personality alignment has implications for every aspect of business. No culture change, strategic shift, growth plan, or marketing or brand campaign will be optimally successful without it. Leaders at Disney, Southwest Airlines, and Nordstrom, to name a few remarkably successful entities, have a distinct record of being able to leverage their cultures to achieve desired results. They understand that culture enables their success. They therefore spend as much time improving culture as they do ensuring that business strategy remains in sync with it. They know it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and sustain results that their culture cannot support.
What is your organization's personality?
One of the mistakes that change leaders make is to assume they understand their organization's culture. Fekete and Company, an Ohio-based marketing firm, profiled fifty-five companies over a two-year period to determine their personalities. As part of the study, each CEO and his or her management team were asked to individually describe the personality of their organization. In 78 percent of the cases, the CEO saw the organization differently than did his or her management team. The study goes on to show significant differences between perceptions by senior management and the rest of the employees (Discovering and Living a Company's True Personality, www.16types.com).
Hopefully, the gaps in perceptions are not as wide in your organization. The more removed you are from the social milieu of frontline employees and from where tactical assignments are executed, the less you should assume about your organization's culture.
Change agents will do well to gain a thorough understanding of their organization's personality. They should invest in a proven approach for gathering this information. Although there are many off-the-shelf corporate personality assessment tools, working with an organization that specializes in collecting and analyzing this information is recommended. These organizations include the aforementioned Fekete & Company, PersonalityTM, Parker LePla, Gartner Consulting, and The Pacific Institute.
Other common mistakes change agents make:
One size fits all. Smart organizations learn from the experimentations and errors of other companies. If another company develops an idea that drastically improves employee or customer satisfaction, why reinvent the wheel?
Change leaders routinely borrow a process or an idea that has been validated elsewhere. They implement it in their organization hook, line, and sinker. The inherent danger in this approach is that it neglects, suppresses, or upsets elements of their culture that are incongruent with the new scheme.
Scantily dressed waitresses are icons of the Hooters brand. They are key to customer satisfaction and have resulted in significant growth for the company. Borrowing this idea, a hospital could serve up scantily dressed nurses. They could have their male counterparts rip off their coats like Chippendale dancers before delivering care. If the suggestions gave you pause, consider the various ideas you might have adamantly pursued in your organization. How many of them caused your employees to recoil? Could you have adapted the idea to your culture?
Strait and narrow. Every trade has its bag of tricks, and the field of organization development is not an exception. Most OD professionals favor experiential learning or learning through action. This promotes self-discovery, enabling learners to acquire skills that will help them elicit from themselves and others solutions to problems. Some HR and OD professionals favor this approach to the exclusion of didactic teaching. On the flip side, traditional trainers might prefer a structured, often lecturesque, method.
Learning is the lifeline of change, and your organization will not change if the learning process is inhibited. If the only way medical students learned about anatomy was to sit in circles and exchange ideas about body parts, they would probably have major limitations as physicians.
Depending on an organization's personality, one approach or a hybrid of approaches might be the effective way to learn. Change agents must be flexible enough to create or adopt the style necessary to facilitate organizational learning. The catch is that they have to understand their culture well enough to come up with the right style.
Improper tenor. While it might be acceptable to have employees gyrate to some of Aerosmith's hardest-hitting songs at the beginning of corporate learning sessions at Google, and while most learning activities at the company might end with Zen-like adventures, the same delivery strategy might attract dire consequences at Cerberus Capital.
Google takes great pride in its friendly and egalitarian culture. Influential subcultures-pop, nerd, geek cultures-share the convivial atmosphere. Dress code is as casual as can be, and some employees' offices are as eccentric and personalized as their former college dorm rooms. Yet the company is remarkably innovative and continues to enjoy high investor, employee, and customer satisfaction. Google's distinct personality enables it to attract and retain the kind of employee who shares its vision.
On the other hand, Cerberus, a private equity firm, is feared and revered on Wall Street. The company, which recently purchased Chrysler, buys ailing businesses, strips them of excess fat, and turns them into profitable ventures. It currently owns a group of companies that employ more than 250,000 people.
CEO and founder Stephen Feinberg is an intense, hard-driving, but elusive and self-effacing person. Directly employing about three hundred people, his intensity and conservative disposition extend throughout his organization. Some of his senior executives have quit as a result of his labor-intensive do-it-yourself approach. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper," Feinberg joked at a recent business meeting, "we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it" (Conde Nast Portfolio, September 2007). Never mind that the name Cerberus was borrowed from the mythologic three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Unlike Google, dress code is formal and office décor is unusually bare bones. Yet many of Cerberus's employees thrive in this environment and the company has consistently outperformed the competition.
For all the organizations in between, an overly eccentric or radical activity can be a distraction. It can erode the integrity of the leader as it smacks of personal knowledge deficit or a lack of understanding of or disregard for the culture.
Aggressiveness. In the movie The Mask of Zorro, a drunk and angry Antonio Banderas charged toward his archenemy, a trained and heartless soldier, to avenge his brother's death. His mentor, Anthony Hopkins, managed to restrain him. In the intervening conversation, Hopkins gave him these words of wisdom: "You would have fought very bravely and died very quickly."
Lauded as the most innovative change agent for corporate culture, Carly Fiorina could not achieve her desired result at Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina had the right idea-turn HP into a more nimble market driver. By many accounts, she did just about everything right except for one thing: she underestimated the power of the HP Way. Even as criticism mounted about her imperial style, intolerance for dissent, finger pointing, swift and harsh measures, and alienation of rank-and-file employees, she proceeded seemingly contumeliously. Consequently, HP's bottom line worsened under her leadership. Ironically, Mark Hurd, a relatively obscure figure, who replaced Fiorina after she was sacked in 2005, managed to accomplish much of what Fiorina dreamed of-delayer the organization, replace some of the old guard, increase response time to the market, improve financial performance-without encountering the same level of resistance and backlash. Like Lafley, Hurd demonstrates that any degree of change can be achieved by working through existing culture even if the ultimate goal is to replace that culture.
The above high-profile examples illustrate what can happen when there is misalignment at the highest level of an organization. The focus here, however, is on how to address this issue at all levels of the organization, with emphasis on the role of human resource, organization development, and training leaders.
What is organizational personality?
Personality is composed of a person's innate tendencies, such as left-handedness or introversion, and external influence such as upbringing and experiences. Both influences, natural and learned, shape assumptions, beliefs, interests, and behavior.
Just as every person has a unique personality, the vision, mission, values, beliefs, assumptions, experiences, and attitude of every organization constitute its distinct personality.
Additional information on how organizations learn, act, grow, and ultimately die like living organisms is well documented in the works of such respected business scholars as Arie de Geus, Peter Senge, and William Bridges.
Why is knowing your organization's personality important?
Strategy and organizational personality alignment has implications for every aspect of business. No culture change, strategic shift, growth plan, or marketing or brand campaign will be optimally successful without it. Leaders at Disney, Southwest Airlines, and Nordstrom, to name a few remarkably successful entities, have a distinct record of being able to leverage their cultures to achieve desired results. They understand that culture enables their success. They therefore spend as much time improving culture as they do ensuring that business strategy remains in sync with it. They know it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and sustain results that their culture cannot support.
What is your organization's personality?
One of the mistakes that change leaders make is to assume they understand their organization's culture. Fekete and Company, an Ohio-based marketing firm, profiled fifty-five companies over a two-year period to determine their personalities. As part of the study, each CEO and his or her management team were asked to individually describe the personality of their organization. In 78 percent of the cases, the CEO saw the organization differently than did his or her management team. The study goes on to show significant differences between perceptions by senior management and the rest of the employees (Discovering and Living a Company's True Personality, www.16types.com).
Hopefully, the gaps in perceptions are not as wide in your organization. The more removed you are from the social milieu of frontline employees and from where tactical assignments are executed, the less you should assume about your organization's culture.
Change agents will do well to gain a thorough understanding of their organization's personality. They should invest in a proven approach for gathering this information. Although there are many off-the-shelf corporate personality assessment tools, working with an organization that specializes in collecting and analyzing this information is recommended. These organizations include the aforementioned Fekete & Company, PersonalityTM, Parker LePla, Gartner Consulting, and The Pacific Institute.
Other common mistakes change agents make:
One size fits all. Smart organizations learn from the experimentations and errors of other companies. If another company develops an idea that drastically improves employee or customer satisfaction, why reinvent the wheel?
Change leaders routinely borrow a process or an idea that has been validated elsewhere. They implement it in their organization hook, line, and sinker. The inherent danger in this approach is that it neglects, suppresses, or upsets elements of their culture that are incongruent with the new scheme.
Scantily dressed waitresses are icons of the Hooters brand. They are key to customer satisfaction and have resulted in significant growth for the company. Borrowing this idea, a hospital could serve up scantily dressed nurses. They could have their male counterparts rip off their coats like Chippendale dancers before delivering care. If the suggestions gave you pause, consider the various ideas you might have adamantly pursued in your organization. How many of them caused your employees to recoil? Could you have adapted the idea to your culture?
Strait and narrow. Every trade has its bag of tricks, and the field of organization development is not an exception. Most OD professionals favor experiential learning or learning through action. This promotes self-discovery, enabling learners to acquire skills that will help them elicit from themselves and others solutions to problems. Some HR and OD professionals favor this approach to the exclusion of didactic teaching. On the flip side, traditional trainers might prefer a structured, often lecturesque, method.
Learning is the lifeline of change, and your organization will not change if the learning process is inhibited. If the only way medical students learned about anatomy was to sit in circles and exchange ideas about body parts, they would probably have major limitations as physicians.
Depending on an organization's personality, one approach or a hybrid of approaches might be the effective way to learn. Change agents must be flexible enough to create or adopt the style necessary to facilitate organizational learning. The catch is that they have to understand their culture well enough to come up with the right style.
Improper tenor. While it might be acceptable to have employees gyrate to some of Aerosmith's hardest-hitting songs at the beginning of corporate learning sessions at Google, and while most learning activities at the company might end with Zen-like adventures, the same delivery strategy might attract dire consequences at Cerberus Capital.
Google takes great pride in its friendly and egalitarian culture. Influential subcultures-pop, nerd, geek cultures-share the convivial atmosphere. Dress code is as casual as can be, and some employees' offices are as eccentric and personalized as their former college dorm rooms. Yet the company is remarkably innovative and continues to enjoy high investor, employee, and customer satisfaction. Google's distinct personality enables it to attract and retain the kind of employee who shares its vision.
On the other hand, Cerberus, a private equity firm, is feared and revered on Wall Street. The company, which recently purchased Chrysler, buys ailing businesses, strips them of excess fat, and turns them into profitable ventures. It currently owns a group of companies that employ more than 250,000 people.
CEO and founder Stephen Feinberg is an intense, hard-driving, but elusive and self-effacing person. Directly employing about three hundred people, his intensity and conservative disposition extend throughout his organization. Some of his senior executives have quit as a result of his labor-intensive do-it-yourself approach. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper," Feinberg joked at a recent business meeting, "we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it" (Conde Nast Portfolio, September 2007). Never mind that the name Cerberus was borrowed from the mythologic three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Unlike Google, dress code is formal and office décor is unusually bare bones. Yet many of Cerberus's employees thrive in this environment and the company has consistently outperformed the competition.
For all the organizations in between, an overly eccentric or radical activity can be a distraction. It can erode the integrity of the leader as it smacks of personal knowledge deficit or a lack of understanding of or disregard for the culture.
Aggressiveness. In the movie The Mask of Zorro, a drunk and angry Antonio Banderas charged toward his archenemy, a trained and heartless soldier, to avenge his brother's death. His mentor, Anthony Hopkins, managed to restrain him. In the intervening conversation, Hopkins gave him these words of wisdom: "You would have fought very bravely and died very quickly."